CHOW
YUN-FAT spent his childhood during the late 1950s in a fishing village
on Lamma Island in Hong Kong. He moved to the city when he was ten,
and at the age of 17 quit school to work at odd jobs. At the urging
of a friend, he enrolled in an actors training course at TVB, Hong
Kong's most powerful television station. A year later he graduated
and signed with TVB as a contract player.
Chow's abilities propelled him to leading man status in just a few
short years. In 1976, Chow starred in the 128-episode drama series
"Hotel", which made him a top television star and household
name in his native Hong Kong. Several years later Chow created another
craze with the 1981 series "The Bund" in which he played
a gangster in 1930s Shanghai. This time he became a household name
in every Southeast Asian country.
Chow started making feature films in 1977. His big break came in
1982 when new wave director Ann Hui teamed with him in "The Story
of Woo Viet". At that time, cheap kung-fu pictures were flooding
and destroying the market. "The Story of Woo Viet" became
a milestone in Hong Kong's cinema history as the first serious film
to be both a critical and commercial success. It also established
Chow as a movie star of the first magnitude.
In 1985 Chow won the Best Actor award at the Asian Pacific Film Festival
and Taiwan's Golden Horse Award for his performance in Leong Po-Chi's
drama, "Hong Kong 1941". The next year, John Woo cast him
in "A Better Tomorrow".
"A Better Tomorrow" took in 35 million Hong Kong dollars
in Hong Kong alone, and Chow won his first Best Actor award at the
Hong Kong Academy Awards. He played the characters twin brother in
the Woo-directed sequel, "A Better Tomorrow 2", and showed
how he acquired his prowess with a gun in the 1989 prequel, "A
Better Tomorrow 3", directed by Tsui Hark.
The genre Woo and Chow launched, substituting guns for kung-fu in
modern versions of ancient Chinese stories of violent morality, gave
new life to Hong Kong's action cinema and defined a new kind of hero
for the 80s and 90s. Chow and Woo continued their collaboration with
"The Killer", "Once A Thief", and Woo's phenomenal
farewell to Hong Kong, "Hard Boiled".
Another key Chow collaborator was Ringo Lam, whose first film with
Chow, "City On Fire", won Chow his second Best Actor award
at the Hong Kong Oscars, inspired Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir
Dogs", and led to three subsequent Chow-Lam collaborations: "Wild
Search", "Prison On Fire 1", "Prison on Fire 2"
and "Full Contact".
Other Chow hits include Wong Jing's "God of Gamblers",
"Witch from Nepal", "The Eighth Happiness", "Tiger
on the Beat", and "Treasure Hunt". Throughout a career
that already spans seventy films, Chow has always welcomed the opportunity
to play in quality dramas, including 1986's "Love Unto Waste";
Mabel Cheung's tragicomic "An Autumn's Tale"; and Johnny
To's "All About Ah Long", which won Chow his third Hong
Kong Oscar in 1989.
Chow made his American film debut in 1998's hit actioner "The
Replacement Killers", directed by Antoine Fuqua. It was followed
by "The Corruptor", co-starring Mark Wahlberg, and the epic
drama "Anna and the King", co-starring award-winning actress
Jodie Foster. Chow went on to star in the Academy Award-winning film,
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" with director Ang Lee and
co-star Michelle Yeoh.
His most recent starring role was in "Bulletproof Monk",
which premiered in April 2003, directed by Paul Hunter and co-starring
Seann William Scott and Jamie King.
Biography taken from the Bulletproof Monk CD-Rom Presskit ©2003
MGM. All rights reserved.
